Heartbreak is a Storytelling Elixer

 

I taught this class for five years and I was heartbroken when I had to leave.

This class turned me into a storyteller. Above is a photo of when we were in first grade circa 2002. I’m the tall one with the flannel shirt and soul patch.

There were a few additions and subtractions to the group over time but I was their teacher for 5 years. I taught in a Waldorf school where the same teacher generally has the same group for all 8 years of elementary and middle school. Go ahead and marvel or judge, but I loved it.

I needed to leave the class after teaching them 5th grade and only recognized the depth of my love for these kids on the last day when we said our goodbyes. There were tears of course, lots of love, lots of gratitude, but I was immediately struck by the grip of heartbreak. It hurt, to be sure, but it became like a solid substance that now owned my internal organs. It was at once the lock and the breaking of the lock.

Heartbreak changed me into the storyteller I am today.

Heartbreak is a lot like grief, but what I felt was more a physiological change. My body, and in particular my heart, clearly … broke. It was broken. Like a bone. But it wasn’t a thing that could heal. It just was how my heart was now.

And strangely, my heart worked even better being broken. It felt more often and with more acuity. It had become something of a super heart. This is how it made me a true storyteller: I could feel the different flavors of pain and discomfort and not only find the right words to describe it, but I could climb into the feeling as I offered the descriptions. This is a potent skill to find and one to experience with marvel.

This was not the first time my heart broke, but it was the moment where I fully noticed and appreciated heartbreak for its storytelling gifts. Holy moly my heart broke many times before then. My heart snapped in half when my high school girlfriend went to college. She was a year older than I was and while she was going off to Duke, my family was moving to another town. (By the way, married that same high school girlfriend many many years later—magic!)

I have felt heartbreak several times since then as well. The circumstances always very different—sometimes big events, sometimes small and ordinary—but they strangely feel the same. Too much metal enters my internal organs and both locks them up, AND breaks them. Sort of like the trash compactor scene in Star Wars

 

Now that I really think about it, the above image is very close to what heartbreak feels like: “There’s no way we’ll get out of this”, “I don’t know what to do”, and “I kind of think its going to be OK, but I also know I will never be the same.”

Everything changed for the Star Wars crew after that moment together.

I moved several times in my life. Three years ago, I left Texas and moved to live with my wife in Massachusetts. I no longer lived down the road from my first wife and parenting partner. And though I love this new chapter with my second wife, my step-daughter and New England beauty, I am also heartbroken.

And I’m grateful for that.

Heartbreak is magic. It is like casting spells and drinking potions.  Heartbreak is more of a movement than an emotion. My history with heartbreak is more like a history with iron—there are times I need more in my blood and there are times when I have way too much.